Email WTF, Ultimate Edition

The Problem: GMail cannot be trusted with your precious emails, or so they say. So much for the other email providers "in the cloud" -- I don't think they won't bend over to a request authoritative enough. Small providers are far too unreliable, even if you pay them. Running your own mail server is expensive: you are going to spend lts of time configuring it properly, your box is gonna spend much more time and power filtering spam than actually sending and delivering your mail, and results won't even come close to GMail's in terms of quality.

Unless you go full retard paranoid and tune your server so it only accepts messages signed with a PGP key you trust, you are pretty much screwed. With full paranoid mode you are screwed as well, because goodbye order confirmations from online shops and responses to your résumé from companies you wanted to work for.

I recently paid namecheap to host two malboxes on my own domain for 2 years. Paid like $20. So far so good, everything work as advertised. I'm slowly moving my shit out of google, starting with the most sensitive stuff first.

By the time humanity realized email is the new global id card, a lot of people got stuck with their balls in the hands of google or even worse, isp-s. Owning your own identity is definitely worth 10-20 bucks a year, imo.

I recently paid namecheap to host two malboxes on my own domain for 2 years. Paid like $20. So far so good, everything work as advertised. I'm slowly moving my shit out of google, starting with the most sensitive stuff first.

By the time humanity realized email is the new global id card, a lot of people got stuck with their balls in the hands of google or even worse, isp-s. Owning your own identity is definitely worth 10-20 bucks a year, imo.

I'd rather have big brother watching me if it means that I get free email hosting, an easy-to-type email address, and really good spam filtering.

This is basically the trade-off you make by doing anything with a third-party service. You get to not worry about running the service with the caveat that they can look through your data if they suspect something's not quite right.

A couple of years ago we tried to convince our IT-department that their e-mail service was broken beyond repair and it would be much easier and cheaper for everyone to buy our e-mail service from gmail. We did not even break a sweat swatting all their counter-arguments for why it would be a bad idea, until the head of the IT-department blurted out this gem:

"Gmail is not capable of handling the volume of e-mail we generate at this university."

At that point we realised it was a lost cause and just stood up and left.

That was the premise of the whole conversation. Saying it at that point would have had very little effect. During the weeks after that we moved all of our computers off their infrastructure and into our own 'radio luxembourg' instead.